Lossless Compression

Overview

Lossless audio compression is a way to store a WAV file more efficiently without losing any audio information. Two popular formats are Monkey's Audio (APE) and FLAC. There are also formats from Apple and Microsoft, along with several other formats like WavPack, Shorten, etc.

Audio Quality

The simple fact is that lossless audio files sound identical to WAV.  

Decoded PCM audio delivery (from an APE, FLAC, WAV, or any other format) happens early in the J. River audio chain, many seconds before the data is heard and completely detached from playback threads.  If the same bits are delivered on the input side (and they are, as this is the whole point of lossless compression) then it doesn't matter the source format.

Advantages Over WAV

Error detection APE and FLAC use strong error detection to ensure that the data delivered at output time exactly matches the original data presented at encode time.

This way, if data corruption happens (more common than you might expect), you will know. With WAV, corruption would never be detected.

Tagging Lossless formats have standard tag formats, making preserving and sharing metadata like the artist, album, cover art, etc. straight-forward.

Space savings Lossless audio compression generally uses about half the disk space of a WAV file.